brother, i've come to take you back to hell
by Duilin
Summary: Maedhros, reborn as a college student in the present day, adopts a child. This little boy knows him from another world, another time. And it scares him. AU
1. i

**a/n: **hello, my name is duilin and i lied about it being only two genres — there's actually several that i'm planning to span into.

also chiaroscuro said no to being updated

apologies

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**brother, i've come to take you back to hell**

* * *

This area of town was the abandoned, dilapidated remnants of the time that had worn it down—a sad testament to the fact that, _yes,_ things were easily forgotten and buried between the 'nothings' and 'other things'. This place was something of a disremembered realm that held everything left behind; the mangled footsteps were left to die in the dust, as were the children behind the door that broke their spirits each time it shut with a pained croak. His eyes were immediately drawn to it, drawn to its discolored, weathered surface as he slid his fingertips down the rough wood and pushed the door open gently with his foot.

It wasn't even locked—as if no one would bother to break into an orphanage anyway.

The first time he had come here, it had been pure coincidence. His friend Finn and he were scavenging through the towns for adventure, and they stumbled upon an old superstition.

_The children there are supernatural. They went beyond this world and have come back._

Naturally, he didn't believe in that sort of mysterious voodoo sham, but Finn convinced him to give it a look—and the experience ended up haunting him. That day, walking past an entire window of curious and resigned eyes, ghostly fingertips pressed against frosted windows, was his nightmare. Finn didn't seem bothered, but something about walking past all of them—_"Finn, I'm going into that building"—_sent apprehensive tingles ricocheting down his spine.

He was feeling the same apprehension now as the eyes of every child in the vicinity pinned him where he stood. The door had creaked loudly, and he only now registered in his mind that he must've frightened a good few of them with the foreign noise.

"May I help you, sir?"

He turned his head to face the woman that suddenly appeared from the top of the dusty staircase-a thin old bag of skin and bones with long raven hair bundled at her waist, lines emblazoned across her expressionless face as she held her elbows and stared down at him with hawk-like eyes. Those eyes were old and tired. _Dry_.

"I had an appointment," he said nervously, tugging at his hair.

She raised an eyebrow at him, and he fought down the wince that had been meaning to surface the moment he'd stepped foot into the dismal threshold.

"Is that so?" Her tone was flat. "Come up here, sir."

He schooled his expression and made his way up the stairs, gripping the banister tightly as seventeen pairs of eyes burned into his back. The old woman gripped his wrist—damn, her hand was a claw of_ ice__—_and pulled him down the hallway and into an office. She forced him into the seat opposite her own, separated by the worn desk in the middle.

"You came here to adopt a child," she said. Her eyes roved over him. "The paperwork speaks for itself; however... how many summers have you seen?"

He stared at her blankly. "Pardon?"

"Your age, sir."

"Oh — I — I just turned twenty."

"Did you have a particular child in mind?"

Another blank stare. After attempting to contact the orphanage - seeing as there wasn't any sort of agency he could converse with - he had instead scheduled an appointment with the woman before him now and mailed the paperwork to her beforehand. But he hadn't really contemplated his next course of action after arriving, and this was the consequence. Tongue-tied before the old hawk, he shook his head. If he hadn't known better, he might have thought that her face showed the faintest signs of exasperation. Next to her hand a cord of rope lay. Her fingers curled around it, and he followed the cord to some sort of odd machinery.

"I will ring a bell. Stand at the staircase and choose."

He nodded and went out into the hallway, ambling down to the top of the grand staircase again. The sound of the bell rang through his bones and rattled him to the core as the heads of all the children lifted reluctantly to face the stranger at the top of the staircase. One by one, they trudged to a stop before the staircase, all of their eyes averted from his own. Those eyes were older than he was.

He swallowed and looked slowly from left to right. All of them looked equally submersed in abject misery as they inspected their feet, but with resigned faces as if they had already consigned themselves to their present lives.

But one child stared straight at him.

Something painful went down his spine, and he stepped back, gripping the balustrade. Sweat broke across his forehead.

Icy blue eyes. Cold.

He shut his own eyes and breathed in deeply. When he opened them again, the child was still staring at him, tilting his head to the side. Strands of oily black hair stuck to his unwashed, grimy face, and his mouth was set in a firm line, a determination not to look away.

Then he felt something on his shoulder and nearly jumped away. It was the old woman from earlier.

"You could."

_I could...what? _His mouth was dry and left no words to say behind on his tongue as the confusion fogged his thoughts.

"Thank you, sir."

_I haven't...chosen...yet...?_

"He's yours."

He opened his mouth to interject. Nothing came out but an unintelligible rasp of faint protest.

"Please care for him well."

Something in her eyes spoke devilish tones to him. He flinched and bowed his head in thanks, making his way down the stairs as the children dispersed. A few gave him glances, almost disappointed—_you didn't save me from this hellhole_—and the others didn't even bother to look. How many times had they not been chosen?

He brushed his thoughts aside with a hard swallow and came to a stop before the child he was now to take care of.

Owlish blue eyes stared up at him with the same intensity from before. Then the boy extended up a hand upward and grasped his hand—and it wasn't so hard to breathe. He allowed himself to relax and led his ward out of the orphanage. As they stepped outside into the dismal grey area and reached his car, he turned to the boy.

"Are you...hungry?" he queried.

"It took you five months to decide that you wanted to adopt me?" the boy asked, as if in response. Icy blue eyes pinned him again. "I waited for you."

He opened the car door for the shorter male to step in and gave the child an apologetic grimace. "I'm sorry I kept you waiting..."

"You've always kept me waiting," the boy said with a knowing smile.

He wasn't sure he understood the meaning behind it.

But as an afterthought, the little boy added, _"Maedhros."_

His nerves short-circuited and were promptly lit aflame. The ground came up and met his knees, and he clutched the car door as he choked. His neurons killed themselves over and over; his lungs refused to fill with air, and he was left asphyxiating on nothing. A light laugh came from above, but if he moved his head in the slightest, even to look up, he was sure that his skull would implode, and all that would be left of his neck and up would be brain matter.

"Sorry. Next time, I'll use your other name."

Something soft placed itself on his head, and the throbbing started to recede.

When there was only a dull reminder of the agony, he inhaled shakily. Then he counted to ten—_one, two, five, seven, eight, six, three... I'm not getting any nearer to ten—_and looked up, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and rubbing his eyes. His body was drenched in cold sweat that chilled even his bones.

"Sorry," the boy repeated with another smile. "Let's go home."


	2. am

**a/n: **i'm sorry that this is one day late!

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His fingers shook at the wheel. Occasionally, his hand would rise to wipe his forehead, and each bump in the road made him wince. That terrible agony returning to incapacitate him... What if he drove off the road and flipped the car? Next to him, the boy started to hum as if to placate the angry silence. Swallowing his own muteness, he attempted to strike up a conversation with his ward, exerting a valiant effort to make his tone as friendly as possible.

Despite the faint quiver in his voice.

"What's your name?"

After a while of silence, he was beginning to reject the notion of getting a response when a soft voice answered him cheerfully, as if he had been carefully crafting his response while the soundlessness crashed in waves around them.

"I wasn't given one properly." The boy's dark-haired head tilted to the side as he swiveled to look at him. "You should name me."

His throat went dry. "I'm not very good at naming things."

His ward gave him a knowing look, and he wondered what would come from those thin lips this time.

"You named your pet fish Bubbles."

The first thing he did was protest for the sake of his dignity. "It was the first thing that came out of his mouth!" Then, his mind backpedaled. "...How did you know that?"

"I know everything about you."

There the boy went with those unsettling words again. The conviction more than convinced him; in fact, he believed in the thought wholeheartedly, and his face paled.

"Well, perhaps not everything," the boy conceded, turning to face the window with a sigh. "I haven't gotten to know this life of yours. Though, you do have a penchant for naming all fish 'Bubbles.'"

"I've...only had one fish."

"This is only _one_ life," was the answer. "You in general had other fish."

Well, he wasn't going to argue with this odd logic, but if he understood what the boy was implying, it was that he had had 'other lives' in which he'd repeatedly bestowed that mundane name upon several fish.

"Of course, you never really liked fish yourself, being that it reminded you of the shore."

His tone was of a forced cheer as he brought himself to speak again, because it was true. Out of some unidentified guilt, he had always stayed as far as he could from the shore. "...You're a little weird."

"I was considered the sanest of us all." The kids in the orphanage? he wondered, but a dark chuckle escaped the boy's lips. "Oh, how they were mistaken... Though, by the end of that time, I had no one left to prove to that it was quite the contrary." It was good that he didn't have to respond (not that he knew what he would say in response), for then: "You really should name me, you know. Only you have the qualifications to give me a name, seeing as my father and mother never bestowed proper names unto me either."

Qualifications as a legal guardian, he assumed, but the boy shook his head.

"No - as close kin."

He thought for a while, glancing to the sun peeking over the tips of the boy's raven hair, rendering it a dark stained gold. "A name that maybe emphasizes your hair color?"

"I'd prefer some that starts with an M."

"...Mark."

The boy's face was _filled_ with pity. "Humans have gotten less and less creative as the ages go along."

He sat back in his seat and sighed, angling the wheel slightly to the right. They were almost about to arrive in the 'other side' of town, where the normal people were. It was weird to some degree-as if he were taking a piece of the abandoned place with him, that piece being right next to him in the passenger's seat, playing with the window controller. _(Later, he would realize that it felt forbidden.)_

"Do you have a name that you prefer?" Before the boy could respond, he added with a long-suffering look, "Something that actually sounds like a name."

From the amused glint in the child's eyes, he could tell he was understood. "All right, all right. I don't have a predilection-though, as for names that actually sound like names, I assure you that my name for you is more of a name than their name for you."

His lips parted in surprise, but he quickly closed his mouth.

"What's _your_ name?"

"Mine?" It dawned on him that he hadn't even introduced himself properly. "Ah - I forgot to introduce myself! My name is Nen."

"Nen? Usually, your name begins with an 'm.'"

"My actual name is Mikhail," he admitted, deciding against dwelling on the boy's comment. "My father wanted to name me Nen, though, and as I grew older, I realized I liked it better."

Understanding flitted across that small, dirty face, but it was a faint flicker that disappeared as soon as it appeared. Then the boy's lips twisted into a wry smile.

"I can understand why your name is Nen now."

Nen tilted his head to the side. "Why so?"

The boy turned to him with a smile. "Nelyafinwe."

This time, it felt as if he felt as if he were driving into a dark sea of red, and the tide was turning over them both. His entire body betrayed him-his blood swarmed in its veins like panicked bees, his heart beating rapidly against his chest as something moved in his throat-_it wasn't air_.

The boy reached out and placed a hand on his cheek. "Works every time," he mused with a smile.

The apprehension twisting in his gut faded, and he slumped down in shock. Dangerous. He was driving, and he could've-

"Are you casting some sort of spell over me?" he asked weakly.

"Not at all!" Another smile-but this time, it looked like it was intended to be a displeased frown. "You only react that way because your body can't handle the thought of being readdressed by it." The smile looked less like a frown and more of a smile now. "For example, if I were to say Maedhros again-"

Something painful sliced through his right wrist, sending electrocuting signals up his nerves as he jerked his right hand from the wheel. Through the sharp pain, he expected his left hand to do the same, expected for his right hand to detach from his wrist in bloody theatrics, but nothing was happening. His wrist was throbbing, and as he stomped down on the pedal, he found that he couldn't feel his right hand anymore. Even if it was still there, he couldn't move the fingers.

"Nen."

He clutched his immobile, dead right hand and turned to the boy with widened eyes. Where his nerves ended at his wrist, the pain began to intensify, each pang beating like his heart, a desperate drum that tried to pour out as much of its life that it could.

"My hand," he croaked.

The boy looked compulsorily contrite. "It's a good thing that you're left-handed this time."

He was silent.

"One would think that your body would know by now not to give all of your strength to a hand you'll eventually lose."

Nen turned the car off. Then he exhaled shakily, clutching the part of his wrist where the feeling and unfeeling met.

"Sorry."

He found his voice along the lines of oblivion and pain. "It's fine."

"No, I was too blunt. I should have waited until you actually lost your hand..."

"Please." _Stop speaking._ "It's fine."

"No, I overstepped my lines."

When the boy reached out for his hand, he wasn't entirely sure what to expect. He couldn't feel the touch of the other's fingers, even as the digits nimbly danced along his palm and then to the back of his frozen hand. The boy gently took his wrist and pulled his arm towards himself.

"What are you - ?"

Something soft pressed against his wrist-it was a mouth-and the feeling returned to his hand. His fingers quivered at the sudden assault of touch, and he yanked his hand away.

This time, the boy was silent as well.

He started the car up again and mutely pressed down on the gas pedal.


End file.
